Jon de Vos: Even if it fits, don’t wear it

I bought a new pair of shoes. The other day my wife was eyeing them. She cocked her head right, left, then finally concluded, “Nice.”

“Thanks,” I said, warily, waiting for the other shoe to drop. She stared for a few more moments before asking, “Where do you intend to keep them?”

Storage had not been a consideration to this point, “I … I imagined I would put them at the bottom of my closet with all the others.”

“Hmm,” she said, “don’t you think you have a lot of shoes?”

“No,” I said, sensing an ill wind, “I have just the right amount. How is it that you’re counting my shoes? Perhaps I should count your bottles of nail polish. Or socks. Some of those shoes I only wear when I’m gardening.”

She turned to look out the window for a moment and shook her head, “You know,” she said, “the only time I’ve ever seen you with a garden rake in your hands you were trying to scratch your back with it. Remember? That didn’t turn out well, did it?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but I was wearing gardening shoes wasn’t I?”

Long count before she continued, “There’s this cottonwood tree out somewhere in the middle of Nowhere, Nevada, where people have tied the laces of old shoes together and flung them up into the branches.”

“So?” I asked.

“Oh, I dunno, I was just looking at that lodgepole out in front and thinking how we could get some spare storage around this joint.”

“Marcos? Didn’t she and her husband loot billions from the Philippine people?”

“Yeah,” I replied, “what about it?”

“I bet she had plenty of closet space.”

If you’re either hard to fit or hard to please when it comes to shoes, you simply must peruse Saks Fifth Avenue’s 8th Floor Shoe Store. There, in the heart of New York City, you can browse through more than 100,000 pairs casually displayed in an area so large it gets its own four-plus zip code, 10022-SHOE. Kid you not.

I know for us Grand County Shut-Ins, shopping in New York City may be a bit inconvenient but where else do you go when only a $2,650 Jimmy Choo Leopard-Studded Suede ankle-boot will do? Add a matching clutch for a mere $3,150 and don’t forget to throw a C-note to the limo driver.

A mere $200 will buy you a plain pair of Burberry ankle-boots. Very quickly the scale ratchets up to a nicer Dior Polaire Mid-Shaft Platform Boot sensibly priced at $1,050. Manolo Blahnik alligator boots can be had for an affordable $7,000 per boot or $14,000 for the pair, should you desire the both of them. The store also sports an express elevator, two restaurants and a VIP shopping area complete with armed guards.

If these prices seem a bit steep, they also have a limited number of used shoes to pick from. For instance, if you are a size 7, you might be interested in a pair worn only once by Anika Noni Rose of “Dreamgirls” to the 2007 Oscars. The shoe is a collaboration between premier luxury shoe designer, Stuart Weitzman, and Kwiat, New York’s leading diamond jewelry company, to create a pair of diamond-studded dream shoes that would grace any woman’s ankle, perhaps yours, for just $500,000.